A dystopia, being the opposite of a utopia, must describe a whole society that has degenerated into something fundamentally nasty, as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). While I prefer Rex Warner's subtle dystopia The Aerodrome (1941), in which the glamorous Airmen run a state presenting itself via a "folkish" England of village cricket and vicarage fetes, Nineteen Eighty-four remains the world's favourite dystopia. This iconic allegory of the authoritarian state introduced dozens of words and phrases into our language and deserves its benchmark status.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is not, as JG Ballard once complained, the temperature at which book paper burns, but it continues to get its message across: the state, fearing an educated citizenry, employs "firemen" whose job is to hunt down readers and confiscate and burn their precious stores of books. "Book-keepers", like Soviet poets, commit whole books to memory. The novel was first serialised in HL Gold's Galaxy magazine, which favoured dystopias and also published The Space Merchants. An influence on Galaxy regular Philip K Dick, Pohl and Kornbluth's book shows big business running society with scarcely even a pretence of democracy. Advertising companies are in control. The protaganist's job is to sell the colonisation of inhospitable Venus to a thoroughly deceived, overpopulated planet.

Angus Wilson's The Old Men at the Zoo offers a dystopia in which the English civil service and other institutions, represented by Regent's Park Zoo, provide the rationale for a gradual descent into fascism, again playing on the worst elements of English nostalgia. As a former civil servant and director of London Zoo, Wilson knew what he was talking about. Seven years later, Thomas M Disch's Camp Concentration presents the US prosecuting an unjust war against most of the planet, using germ warfare and other similarly immoral methods. In a Guantánamo-style prison camp, inmates are injected with a type of syphilis to see if human intelligence can be increased to genius level. This beautifully written vision of hell, full of literary references, is science fiction at its best.

Margaret Atwood denies that The Handmaid's Tale is science fiction, I suspect because, like several others, she has unconsciously reinvented certain familiar SF tropes to serve her purpose. The novel is a fine feminist dystopia in which fertile women become sex slaves in a male-run, pseudo-Christian US now known as Gilead. It's almost as original and powerful as Joanna Russ's The Female Man, which has a strong dystopian element but was published as SF and therefore marginalised by the general public. Who needs "firemen" or Big Brother when you can make books invisible?

•Michael Moorcock was editor of New Worlds. His most recent book is The Metatemporal Detective (Prometheus)